


fickle

by orphan_account



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: F/M, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:13:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23587441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lori Summers was Not Dead. She was alive, alive, alive. Maybe she'd be better off dead, but she wasn't. She was living, every inch of her body filled with the burning determination of someone who looked Death in the eye and Death blinked first. Finding the other lone survivor in the apocalypse was the best and worst thing that ever happened to Lori Summers. Because she was alive, and she wasn't alone. She had someone, and someone had her. She had something to fight for, and that something's name was Five.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Original Character(s), Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy) & Reader, Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)/Original Female Character(s), Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)/Reader
Comments: 11
Kudos: 84





	1. on the long way down

* * *

day 1

Lori has never had her knees taken out from under her by sheer force of emotion before. It's a disconcerting experience, to say the least, but she takes no note of it- the way the floor rushes up to meet her, the way it blurs and disappears as she dissolves into violent, shrieking sobs. The skin on her knees tears and reformed, and all Lori wants is for it to stay broken, because pain means she can hurt, which means she can die.

She's never wanted the ability to die quite so much.

"Mommy, mommy, mommy, please, mommy, wake up," Lori's pleading and praying and _begging_ , but her mom doesn't move, doesn't take in a breath and doesn't open her eyes and she _doesn't come back_.

She's not like her daughter. She doesn't come back.

Lori screams herself raw, that day. It's not hard to do, with the smothering ash and the burning smoke. She falls asleep next to her mother's body and buries her in a shallow grave in the morning. She never finds her sisters. It's barely two feet deep- Lori had no shovel and the earth was scorched solid. She'd dug every bit of it with her hands, breaking of the skin of her fingers open over and over again. It heals, it always _fucking_ heals, but the bitterest part of Lori, something that used to be small and hidden in a dark part of her until she woke up in a wasteland and found her mother dead and it spread to cover her whole, desperately hopes to get a disease and die from it. 

It's a childish hope.

Lori sleeps atop her mother's grave that night, a rope looped through a gold ring, the only thing she'd had the nerve to take from her mother's body, clutched in her bloody knuckles.

And then she tries something that doesn't work in the morning. She does not talk about it, becuase, as her mother liked to tell her- her _mom_ , who made her breakfast every morning and protected her from the world and who smelt of vanilla and safety and her mother who was dead and gone- stop and think about the facts when you're lost.

So here are the facts.

1: Lori cannot seem to die.

2: Everyone else died. Every last one of them, all gone. They were gone away, leaving behind nothing but bodies in the streets and Lori. Lori Cortez and Death were old friends; in fact, she'd died about twice a year. She never stayed dead for long. She didn't know the date, the year, anything at all. The last thing she remembered, it was 2002 and she'd gotten home from school. It wasn't 2002 now, and-

3: Lori was born Delores Cortez on October 1st, 1989. You know how the story goes. .

4: When she was seven, she woke up after a fall from a hotel window (she was a reckless kid, and the powers never helped) to her mom crying over her body. At seven, Lori did not understand. At thirteen, clutching the body of her mother to her chest and trying to bring her back even though she knew she couldn't becuase death was the line she could not cross, she understood.

5: Pain is pain, but what she felt as she dug her mother's grave in the scorched dirt of the park they always visited together, that was different. Worse. Worse than death, worse than anything. Lori Cortez cried until the sun rose on the horizon, and she didn't stop crying until her mother lay sound in her grave.

* * *

day 245

Lori wonders, sometimes, why she tries to survive at all. By the second month, she's so clearly fighting to survive- a bandana around her nose and mouth, mostly-undamaged swimmers goggles over her eyes, carting around cans of food in the biggest backpack she could find.

The answer is always that dying is so much more unpleasant than surviving. It's thought to herself, bitterly, when she realizes she's going to become familiar with the taste of rat at some point of her godforsaken life. The real answer is that she's afraid of what she'll look like if she gives up.

Still, the sentiment remains, reminding herself of how utterly alone she's become, whispers floating around every burned corpse she found, every little thing reminding her that it wasn't always this painful, her life. It had been uniform skirts and going out for donuts with her mom when Lori got straight A's. Her past became her escape, and her present left a bitter taste in her mouth, of ash and loneliness.

She's been picking her way through the ruins of a highway that had long since seen its last car for the past week. Or was it two? Time works funny when nobody keeps track of the days. Lori hadn't realized how much the lives of strangers mattered to her until there weren't any strangers left. She missed them, her strangers.

The man who owned the bakery on the corner of the block would always be making bread when Lori walked to school, and she learned to associate the smell of fresh bread with sunrises and birdsong. Now the only thing she had left was the sunrises. The man who owned the bakery died and so did the birds and the walk to school.

The end of everything really puts things in perspective when you aren't included in the category of "everything", like what your heartbeat sounds like or that humans would go to extraordinary lengths to feel human. Like how few things truly mattered to her.

So very few that they all fit into her bag, which wasn't really a bag but rather a bedsheet she'd tied into a sack and whenever she finds a place to stay the night she'll lay her things on the ground and wrap herself in the sheets and pretend that when she wakes up it would be to her mother making pancakes for her before she goes to school.

She's made new memories now that she no longer had the old ones. Like the jingling of her grandmother and grandfather's wedding bands around her neck with when she'd go looking for a new place to sleep, tied together with a piece of twine. Her mother used to wear them the same way. 

The rings were all Lori took from her body. The rings and the twine from the kitchen in her no-longer home. The twine and the rings and the jingling of having nowhere to sleep except everywhere because who the hell was gonna stop her? She doesn't fear death, she doesn't fear anything.

Lori Cortez runs on fumes and recklessness, dangerous things for someone like her.

In a week she'll be fourteen. Maybe a day or two it sooner, maybe a day later. She's lost count of the days and she can't bring herself to care. 

She can see a used-to-town in the far-off distance. Maybe it had been a city before, not a town. Those words don't mean much, now. The difference between a city and a town was the number of people and people were something the world didn't have much left of anymore. There were no cities and no towns and no people. People meant more than one and there's only a person. One person. The last.

Lori, the last person. The last person, Lori.

* * *

day 253

Yesterday, Lori had turned fourteen. Or is that tomorrow? In the beginning, she'd kept a tally on the remnants of her home. When it became too painful to stay anymore, she'd scratch it into a piece of scrap metal from a car wreck she carried with her. She'd left it behind in the last town. She's left quite a lot of things behind in the places she used to sleep.

She'd had a watch in the beginning. It didn't need batteries and Lori kept it around because she'd worn a watch in the Before. That got abandoned, too, when the ticking of every second gone by made Lori feel more machine than human; and humans would go to extraordinary lengths to feel human. Human. Singular: Lori.

When she finally reaches the no-longer-a-city not-a-town, she wants to collapse, her knees are already half-buckling as she stumbles, but collapsing isn't something that Lori allowed herself to do. Starvation was one of the worst ways to go, and Lori isn't sure that if she collapsed like a corpse in the street, she'll have the strength to get up again.

The whole world was a mass grave, Lori realized at around the third week all alone, and it's a club exclusive to everyone but her.

When she sees the building, an odd, circular thing with a roof made of scrap metal, her first thought wasn't that someone clearly rebuilt the walls and added the roof, it was that in front of her stood a building with walls and a roof, a luxury she hadn't encountered since she'd needed to construct something similar last winter. Her frenzy over a pre-made shelter is completely justified, which is why, despite her utter exhaustion, she made it through the poor excuse of a doorway in seven seconds flat.

That scares the building's current occupant. Lori has lost some of her manners in the months since the world's ending. Forgive her for not speaking. 

Neither expected to be put in such a situation, in which one lone survivor is pointing a hunting rifle at the other. It was, as usual, utterly silent until one of the two fills the void.

"Who the hell are you?" Asks the boy- and he is a boy, no older than her, and Lori doubts that when he stands from his seat he'll be taller, either-. His grip on the gun tightens to compensate for the way his hands shake. His voice cracks, stiff and hoarse from lack of use. Lori doesn't have an answer, her eyes wide beneath her goggles that she wore to keep the sun off her face.

There's no sunscreen in the apocalypse, you see.

Lori stands stock still for another moment before swaying, once, twice, and then collapsing completely. The combination of dehydration, shock, and exhaustion became altogether too much, and she welcomes the darkness that envelops her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lori's playlist for kicking ass and saving the world:  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lEHMKzy4EV4cAHgaf60aj?si=nHCq0T_vSYyGSB1v6-Ntfw


	2. what a lovely basket case

day 1137

* * *

  
"Where the _hell_ were you!" 

Five winces, turning around gingerly. Lori can't tell if he's just scared of her- becuase he knew, he _knew_ , that Lori suffocates in fear when she's alone and he's _left her_ \- or if it's the massive gash on his side.

"You were gone a week, a week! I thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere! You could've at least given me a heads up before _leaving_ me here and-"

"Oh my god. What happened? Oh my god, I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna actually choose to be all alone here becuase I am going to _kill_ you," Lori grits out, the bite to words contrasted by the gentle way her fingers ghost over Five's button-up shirt, once white, now filthy with dirt and blood. More fresh than not.

"Yeah, you're making it really obvious, with the whole saving my life thing-" Five says, and then yelps as Lori pulls his arms from the mostly ruined shirt in a practiced motion.

"Impressive, Five, what was that, a G10?" Lori asks, pouring alcohol on the cleanest scrap of fabric around and bracing one hand against Five's bare, bloody chest as she prepares to disinfect his wound before closing it. It's a practiced routine.

"At least take me out to dinner first, Christ," Five smirks, a little bit loopy from the blood loss. Endearing, but an unneeded distraction, considering Lori's in the middle of saving his life.

"Can it, Fiver, I'm in the middle of something if you hadn't noticed,"

"Busy, what, being my knight in shining rags?" Five's slurring his words, which is never very much not a good sign. But he's still five, and the rat bastard was nearly as unkillable as Lori herself, so kudos to him.

"Yeah, dumbass. Now bite down on this," Lori says, shoving a balled-up fabric scrap between his teeth, her vision tunneling. Five's taken to calling it NURSE MODE, but Lori knows she'd learned it from her mother, and she was a doctor, thank you very much. Five surely has a sarcastic and incredibly inappropriate comment on the tip of his tongue, but it's fortunately stifled by the fabric between his teeth. 

"Okay, on three. One-" Lori says and immediately lays her hand flat over the middle of the gash spanning Five's collarbone to halfway down his bicep. Fives lets out a muffled scream, but it's cut off when Lori starts _glowing_ , because right, she glows now, and Lori _feels_ the skin beneath her hand repair, moving like a living thing. 

"You said on three!" Five complains weakly, as Lori removes her hand from the bloody but unmarred skin left in her wake. His head lolls back as his body adjusts to the sudden lack of pain- the rush of endorphins tends to mimic a high, he'd said last time this had happened. He doesn't comment on the prayer Lori murmurs under her breath in rapid, grateful Spanish to a god neither of them believes in.

He'd looked down on religion and up to science, a by-product of being raised by a man with a god complex and the mindset of a drill sergeant, and she'd given up on her God long ago. But at that moment, Lori thanks some higher power- not quite the one she'd prayed to in the church as a child, nor one of Greek or Roman or Norse descent, or any legend, for that matter. Maybe it 's Lady Luck, or Fate, or just herself and the power she'd been cursed with. She thanks whoever's listening.

Nobodies listening.

They were alone, and the only one who heard her prayers were Five. She's praying for Five, she's praying to Five. What does it matter when they're alone? Humanity died and their Gods died with them. The only one who hears Lori's prayers for Five is Five, holding her hands to a bloody torso. She prayed for who she prayed to at that moment, and it's so incredibly ironic she almost laughs.

But, really, she'd worship him any day. Naughty brain.

"Yeah, well. You said you wouldn't do shit like this anymore, and look where that got us," Lori laughs weakly, pretending the ground isn't spinning under her feet and she can't quite tell why she's seeing double.

"Well, I'm looking and- oh! Look at that! Good as new!" Five snarks, not quite dry enough to be anything other than happy, a newfound rush of energy running through his veins. Again, that's Lori. Or maybe the light from her hands. Are they separate beings? Lori always talks about it like a curse- well, she never talks about it much, save for when they found old liquor bottles and relished in feeling like they were breaking some long-dead rules.

"Yeah, no thanks to you. Do you even _have_ self-preservation instincts?" Lori laughs back, energy seeping back into her veins as the world stops spinning. She spins herself around, sitting down next to Five on their makeshift couch. It's littered with burn marks and holes- and a fresh bloodstain, too- but it's the most intact thing they own. Besides the nest-bed, and they take turns on who sleeps where.

"Who needs self-preservation instincts when I have you?" He asks, laying his head on Lori's shoulder, who, in turn, lest her head fall until it rests on top of Five's.

"You're an ass, you know that? I'd like to see you not die before the age of seventeen, you-you ass!" Lori exclaims, offended, her body relaxing against Five's. She basks in the warmth of the moment, the sun shining on her skin through that hole in the roof they've not yet patched and Five's arm around her shoulders. The two are friends- just friends. Well, as just as friends can be when they're quite literally together till the bitter end.

It's not that they're afraid of affection, but they're sixteen, and just realizing that they found the other attractive, which made things awkward, to say the least. They need each other, but they're still teenagers- as childish and immature and foolish as they're allowed to be. So, sure, they touch, but they avoid intimate moments such as this one. The reminder that there's something _more_ between them is not a welcome one.

Or rather, it's so very welcome that it's a bit frightening. Because Lori loved Five and Five loved Lori and it's almost too much to bear because there's really nothing else to lose.

"I mean it when I say you have to stop, though, Icarus," Lori murmurs, acutely aware of the way Five's body curves against her own and the way his arm drapes around her shoulders and the way she's so in love with him it feels like drowning.

"You know I try," Five tells her, his voice low and a bit husky with something neither of them can place. He sounds close to tears, and neither of them has cried since. Well.

"You fucking suck at it, Five," Lori tells him plainly, and feels him stiffen. She does not turn to meet his eyes. She can't.

"I can't, I can't lose you, Fiver. I just can't, you got that? Not you, not fucking you, you're all I got" Lori says, and it seems calm and even, but there's a manic light behind her eyes if you look and she's speaking just a touch too fast.

"I can't lose you either, Lor," Five said it with such certainty that it clicks, then, for Lori. She loves him so much it felt like drowning and he loved her so deeply it felt like flying. She loves and is loved in return.

It clicks for him too, then. Not just the way that Lori so desperately needed him and the way he needed her, but the way his hands were cupping her cheeks and the way she's grabbing onto his wrists hard enough that he knows he isn't dreaming. The way they were so close he could feel her breath dancing over his cheeks and he could see the way the sunlight is hitting her face her eyes lit up in the most beautiful shade of gold he's ever seen. He's utterly at her mercy, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

"I love you, Five," The confession tumbles out of her lips before it could lodge itself in her throat like it had so many times before. He doesn't answer, not with words, at least. The crashing of his lips into hers is answer enough.

Five kisses Lori, and she kisses him back.

Lori loves Five, and he loves her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lori's playlist:  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lEHMKzy4EV4cAHgaf60aj?si=4Q94AcK0QQuwCIK3k5XgQg


	3. you keep thinking that you'll never get burnt

The Handler comes for them two weeks after Lori's thirty-third birthday. Of course, she didn't know the date at the time, and it held no real meaning to her at the time. Lori felt it was worth noting, still- it's why she asked, after all. Not knowing the date was one of the worst parts of the apocalypse, when all they had to go on were the sad excuses for seasons. Sure, it wasn't all too near the top of the cons list, but, still.

So. These are the dates of it all.

It's been thirty-nine years since Lori & Five were born.

Twenty-six years since the apocalypse.

Twenty-five since she'd met Five. 

Fourteen since they got married, although all that happened at that particular ceremony was the exchanging of rings and the consumption of two full bottles of wine. 

And six years since Lori turned thirty-three.

She never really believed in- heaven, hell, all of it. A foundation of shaky belief at best stood no chance at the bitter realization that nobody's coming to save you, and no matter where everyone you've ever loved ended up, you can't join them. She tried, in that first year. She stopped when she met Five, and it sounds so simple and maybe it is.

Maybe it isn't. Maybe that ice-cold fear that resides behind her sternum will come to pass and she'll be left all alone again and this time Five won't come to save her, arrogant boy and broken boy and loyal boy he is. Because maybe, no matter how much Lori wants it to mean something, it doesn't matter that they age the same. Maybe it will be a bullet or a blade or cancer and maybe they will deserve it.

Becuase she doesn't much care what they deserve. Because broken little kids became dangerous people, when you break them so fully and give them guns and knives and point them the way you want them to go and-

Well.

It's not pretty. They're the best of the best, Lost-Boy and Rage-Girl they grew up as and it's so easy to rationalize killing when you grew up like that. She'd thought that missing humanity so fully would make you appreciate it, but really, it's the opposite. Looking out on humanity the way they did makes them cold, distant, and utterly dangerous. Perfect killers. It's why The Handler chose them, Lori thinks, when she lies in bed at night and tries to rationalize the life that's happened to her. Psychopathy, made. Except there's one difference. It catches up to the pair of them, that glass barrier doesn't last outside of the apocalypse. They're not killers for the sake of being killers, but that's a secret.

It doesn't stop them. Doesn't so much as slow them down.

They're a good team- best assains to ever touch down in the 1600s, according to a plaque sitting in a dusty corner of somewhere Lori doesn't care enough about to remember. She doesn't know if it's true. She knows that Five is the best damn sniper she's ever seen, and she's never lost a fight. The inability to die does give her a leg up, but it's not cheating if Five teleports everywhere, too, no matter whether or not the bastard could've walked. He claims bad joints and Lori gives him the most deserved middle finger of all time. With all the healing Lori does, his joints will be bad around the same time she's dead.

In the beginning, she used guns and knives and explosives and she nearly cried the first time- sitting on the edge of a bathtub, covered in blood and waiting for the tears to come. They didn't- neither of them have cried in a long time. By the fifth time, she doesn't blink when the target's head explodes- Five, always a marksman. By the twentieth, she's begun bitching when she gets blood on her clothing. 

She's lost count now, and almost doesn't understand why she almost cried that first time. Her and Five are the best contract killers of all time, literally, and she's no longer nauseous at the thought.

It's probably why they were trusted with the JFK shooting. Funnily enough, it was her favorite unit of history class as a kid. Never imagined she'd be participating.

Or royally screwing it over, depending on where you stand on the issue.

"I'm telling you, Five-" Lori says. Five's the sniper, and while Lori's not a shit marksman by any definition of the word, she always feels a bit useless on long-distance jobs. Probably becuase she's acting a bit useless, as her husband will delight to inform her when she asks him if he really thinks he can make the shot. He always can, of course, but it's so much fun, getting under his skin. There's a radio blaring beside them, and Lori could laugh at how easy the play-by-play makes the job.

"Why don't you try it then, dearest?" Five snipes back, a sarcastic smile adorning his face, his gaze not so much as flickering up from his sister's book. 

Lori sighs and tells him the equations at the beginning. It was page goddamn three, and she has no idea how the genius is such a scatterbrain sometimes.

"Well, I would, you see, but it seems that some wires got crossed and it's your power, asshole," Lori says, reclining against the fence and messing with her handgun the way one might a pen.

Five doesn't even dignify her with a response, which is fair.

"All I'm saying, if I get stuck as a middle schooler I just might off myself, permanently," 

"Darling, if you get stuck in your thirteen-year-old body you'll just have to suck it up," Five snaps, and Lori knows when to stop pushing. Also because he grabs her hand sticks it on the back of her neck. Lori doesn't dignify that with a response. Also, she's a bit busy providing him with as much juice as possible.

It's a system they figured out during the years they've spent as Commission workers. His power is a part of him, and jump-exhaustion is a part of him too. Which means she can heal it, which always comes in handy when they need to haul ass out of a messy job.

Jumping with him is second nature by this point, but, well. Here's the thing about time travel- it _hurts_. Lori, who possesses an inhumanly high pain tolerance, thanks to an inhumanly high amount of pain experienced, considers herself an expert on pain. And, well, time travel isn't the worst thing she's ever felt, it registers, which usually means its agonizing to a normal person. Lori doesn't like to think about all the ways her abnormalities separates her from humanity. She feels like she's on a separate plane of reality than she was at thirteen, and she was a troubled thirteen-year-old.

But the portal opens, and thank god it does becuase she's not in the mood to die in the 1960's, of all places. Breaking a contract is a risky thing, considering the amount of people she's killed for doing just that. But they can't send Lori-and-Five after themselves, so. She steps back, sways, and collapses into her husbands awaiting arms. He grunts, and she hits his chest lightly at the implication. He'd normally scold her, but nows not the time.

Now's _so_ not the time.

She's back on two feet seconds later, because Lori doesn't stay down. Lori really needs to learn how, but that's an issue for another time.

"Hey, Atlas?" Lori asks. It's a well-worn nickname that Five responds to without fail.

"What?" He asks, with no heat behind the words.

"Bet you twenty bucks the equations off," She grins him, and takes his hand, dragging him with her into the crackling portal.

She's so gonna get those twenty bucks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lori's playlist:  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lEHMKzy4EV4cAHgaf60aj?si=nHCq0T_vSYyGSB1v6-Ntfw


End file.
